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The Justice Department will take on affirmative action, according to a report in the New York Times. Buzz60

Happier Times: Since assuming office, President Trump has been dismantling Barack Obama's legacy -- in court.(Photo: Pool, Getty Images)

WASHINGTON From affirmative action and immigration to voting rights and LGBT protections, the Trump administration is switching sides in some of the nation's most consequential legal battles.

The rapid-fire reversals of Obama administration policies and legal positions throws the weight of the U.S. government from one side to the other in a number of hotly contested court battles, including several headed toward the Supreme Court.

In the space of 12 days recently, the Justice Department saidcivil rightslaws do not protect gays and lesbians from workplace discrimination andvoting rights laws do not prevent states from cleansing registration rolls of non-voters. In between, it indicated it may fight, rather than defend, affirmative action policies at colleges and universities.

That followed similar about-faces in some of the biggest legal battles waged by President Barack Obama to defend his signature immigration, health care and climate change initiatives. Trump also has flipped the government's position in lesser-known court fights over workers' rights, women's rights and transgender rights.

"Many of these changes are not just changes in policy, but theyre actually reversing the U.S.government'sofficial position on what statutes mean," says David Cole, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union."What a statute means ought not change from one administration to another. The law is the law.

Read more:

'SEE YOU IN COURT:' Trump's vow proves prophetic

Trumps Justice Department reverses Obama's stance on Ohios voter purge

Trump's immigration stance fuels opposition with millions in donations and volunteers

Policy changes at the start of a new administration are nothing new, particularly when the White House changes hands politically. What appears to be different nowis the volume of change, the number of ongoing court battlesand the mandate Trump claimedto dismantlethe key achievements of his predecessor.

In some cases, the new administration is threatening to take its policy reversals even further through court action:

On immigration, the Department of Homeland Security in June ended Obama's program to protect from deportationmillions of undocumented immigrants whose children are citizens or permanent residents. Now, faced with legal action by Texas and other states, it is considering ending the five-year-old program that has protected 800,000 immigrants who came to the United States as children.

On health care, the administration is mulling whether to drop itsappeal of a lower court decisionstriking down a provision of Obama's Affordable Care Act that pays insurers to keep costs down for low-income participants. Without the reimbursements, insurance premiums could skyrocket. A coalition of Democratic attorneys general is preparing take over the appeal if necessary.

On climate change, the government has played a similar waiting game, getting the same appeals court to delay ruling on Obama's landmark Clean Power Plan, which cuts greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants. That keeps the policy, which has been on hold for 18 months, from taking effect.

In the climate change and other environmental lawsuits, their first course of conduct has been to try to get the courts off their back," says David Doniger, director of the climate and clean air program at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

President Trump's legal assault on Obama administration policies includes voting rights cases.(Photo: Marcio Jose Sanchez, AP)

The latest example of Trump reversing Obama in court came in a voting rights case to be heard by the Supreme Court this fall. The justices will rule on Ohio's challengeto a federal appeals court ruling that struck down itsmethod ofpurging voters from registration rolls based on inactivity.

Obama's Justice Department last year urged the appeals court to rule against Ohio because its method of culling voter registration rolls "triggers the removal process without reliable evidence that a voter has movedand ... inevitably leads to the removal of voters based on failure to vote."

But this month, Trump's Justice Department intervened on Ohio's side, asserting that Ohio "does not remove registrants solely for their initial failure to vote" but only if they fail to answer a notice and continue to miss federal elections.

The Ohio reversal follows the Trump administration's decision to reverse its predecessor's position againstTexas' tough photo identification requirements. A federal judge found that the law was intended to discriminate against minorities, but in February the Justice Department dropped that claim, and last month it said a revised law no longer harmed minorities at all.

On voting rights and other issues, "this is the most aggressive set of changes we've seen," says Paul Smith, vice president of the Campaign Legal Center and a frequent Supreme Court litigatorwho specializes in defending voters' rights.

Before the Ohio case is heard, the Supreme Court will open its 2017 term in October with a major case about workers' rights to file class action lawsuitsrather than being forced to resolve disputes through arbitration.

Obama's Justice Department defended the National Labor Relations Board's determination that forced arbitration is an unfair labor practice. The Trump administration switched sides in June, leaving the NLRB to represent itself in court.

And before long, the high court is likely to take on the threshold question of whether federal civil rights laws regarding discrimination in education and employment cover sexual orientation and gender identity. Federal appeals courts have split on the issue.

The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, dominated by Obama's appointees, argued in May that gays and lesbians should be covered under the laws. But the Justice Department last month said the opposite.

Supporters of the DACA program that protects immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children rally in New Mexico last month.(Photo: Roberto E. Rosales, AP)

The immigration, health care and climate change battles could reach tipping points in the next few weeks.

Texas and other states opposed to Obama's immigration policies have given the Trump administration until Sept. 5 to make its next move on the program affecting immigrants who came to the U.S. as children.

A group of immigration law scholars and professors wrote to Trump Monday, urging that he keep the program intact despite the chance it would be thrown out in court.

"The legal authority for the executive branch to operate DACA 2012 is crystal clear," they said. "As such, choices about its future would constitute a policy and political decision, not a legal one."

A decision is imminent this month on the Obamacare lawsuit. While the administration has maintained insurance companyreimbursements for the time being, Trump has talked brazenly about letting the program fail and has criticized Senate Republicans for not repealing it.

"This is an essential component of the political battle thats taking place between the Democrats and the president," says Ron Pollack, the founder of the health care advocacy group Families USA.

On affirmative action, the Trump administration has yet to announce any new policy or legal action. But while the Obama administration sided with the University of Texas in its successful defense ofracial preferences, Trump's Justice Department recently asked lawyers to investigate complaints that Harvard University's affirmative action programhelps blacks, Hispanics and even white students over Asian Americans.

"This administration seems to be much more willing to let politics override legal judgments in the positions they take in court," the ACLU's Cole says. "In the long term, that's likely to make their views less influential."

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President Trump is trying to reverse Obama's legacy through legal battles - USA TODAY

Former president Barack Obama wowed the crowd at a Chance the Rapper concert in Chicago on Saturday night during a surprise video guest appearance, sharing inspirational words about the next generation of leaders and applaudingthe young rapper for his support of the citys youth.

The free concert followed the Bud Billiken Parade, the countrys oldest and biggest African American parade and an annual back-to-school tradition in Chicago since 1929. Chance, who served as grand marshal of the parade,surprised fans by handing out tickets to his Saturday night show at Chicagos Auditorium Theatre.

Appearing on a massive screen onstage, Obama congratulated Chance for his role in the parade and his longtime support of Chicagoschildren. The Grammy Award winner donated $1 million to Chicago Public Schools earlier this year, and his localcharity, SocialWorks, handed out 30,000 backpacks filled with school supplies to students at Saturdays parade, according to the Chicago Tribune.

[Chance the Rapper chips in $1 million to help Chicago public schools funding crisis]

We want to make sure our kids are safe. We want to make sure that they are ready for going back to school. We want to make sure that we are nurturing and protecting and encouraging and loving the next generation of leaders all throughout the city of Chicago, Obama said in his recorded message, his words occasionally drowned out by cheers and whistles. So Chance, I am grateful for everything you have done on behalf of our young people back home. You are representing the kind of young people who come out of Chicago and change the world.

[Michelle Obama surprises Chance the Rapper with a tribute at BET Awards]

It wasnt the first time a member of the Obama family has showered praise on the 24-year-old musician: When Chance won the Humanitarian Award at the BET Awards in June, Michelle Obama surprised him with a special video tribute, calling him an outstanding role model.

The rest is here:
Obama praises Chance the Rapper during a surprise appearance at Chicago concert - Washington Post

President Donald Trumps many-sided response to the weekends white-supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginiaincluding the lethal car-ramming of anti-Nazi protesters by a 20-year-old Adolf Hitler admirerpredictably prompted a paroxysm of rationalization by the folks at Fox & Friends.

On Monday mornings show, regular cohost Steve Doocy, along with weekend hosts Abby Huntsman and Pete Hegseth (subbing for the vacationing Ainsley Earhardt and Brian Kilmeade), twisted themselves and the facts into a tangled mess in order to the blame Democrats and the media for the widespread criticism being heaped upon Trump.

Theres been a lot of outrageDemocrats, media, Huntsman declared, and held up the front page of a New York newspaper sporting the headline THE NAZI TRUMP WONT CALL OUT.

I was looking at the Daily News this morning, Huntsman said. I knew right away, when he didnt call it for what it wasa lot of people thought he should, many members of the Republican Party as wellI knew exactly the direction the media would take it, and the Democrats would take it. Because it fits right into the narrative many of them had the whole time hes been presidentthat he supports these types of groups.

No matter what, they were gonna say that, said Hegseth, who on Sundays installment of Fox & Friends had praised the president for not immediately picking a side out [of] the gate, and seemed to defend the white nationalists and neo-Nazis, some of them sporting swastika armbands, who had come to Charlottesville to protest the removal of a statue commemorating Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

Justifying Trump on Monday, Hegseth claimed: I think the president nailed it... First he condemns in the strongest possible terms hatred and bigotry. He salutes the police. He talks about our country and how we should rally around it. And then yesterday he came outand the White House came outwith a very strongly and specifically worded statement.

That, to put it charitably, was an eccentric take on the presidents Saturday statement, in which he ad-libbed equal culpability (many sides, many sides) on both the neo-Nazis and their opponents for the violence, in which 32-year-old counterdemonstrator Heather Heyer was killed when James Alex Fields Jr. allegedly rammed an anti-Nazi crowd with his Dodge Challenger, tossing bodies in the air, and then fled the scene.

Meanwhile, the Sunday statement Hegseth praised came from an insistently anonymous White House spokesperson, not from President Trump.

In a blithe defense of the alt-right and neo-Nazi protesters who had showed up to support white nationalism, Hegseth had said Sunday that theres always a grievance underneath it that its worth talking about. And we should never live in such a politically correct culture that we cant at least have a conversation. Theres a reason those people were out there.

Meanwhile, in especially egregious instances of dishonest editing, the program first ran video of Vice President Mike Pence condemning white supremacists but excluded Pences trashing of the national media for spend[ing] more time criticizing the presidents words than they did criticizing those that perpetrated the violence to begin with.

Then, in a second instance of willful dishonesty, Fox & Friends played a clip of then-President Barack Obama speculating on the motives of a murderer who shot and killed five Dallas cops during a July 2016 Black Lives Matter protesthe noted that its dangerous to tar a whole movement with the evil act of a deranged individualwithout mentioning that he called the shootings a vicious, calculated, despicable attack on law enforcement.

He wasnt actually entirely wrong, but the grace given to him of course is never given to President Trump, Hegseth complained. And Huntsman drew an indefensible parallel from Obamas cautionary statement to the appropriate blame-fixing in Charlottesville.

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Unfortunately, that happens all too often today, right? she said. You have one individual and that then turns into speaking for a political party, speaking for a much bigger group, for a presidentthats when it gets very complicated and problematic.

Was Huntsman making the point that the white nationalists and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville were a much bigger group that shouldnt be held in any way accountable for the homicidal act of one of their supporters? It sure sounded like it.

See the rest here:
'Fox & Friends': Trump on Charlottesville Is Same as Obama Was on Dallas Attack - Daily Beast

The Obama administration received multiple warnings from national security officials between 2014 and 2016 that the Kremlin was ramping up its intelligence operations and building disinformation networks it could use to disrupt the U.S. political system, according to more than half a dozen current and former officials.

As early as 2014, the administration received a report that quoted a well-connected Russian source as saying that the Kremlin was building a disinformation arm that could be used to interfere in Western democracies. The report, according to an official familiar with it, included a quote from the Russian source telling U.S. officials in Moscow, "You have no idea how extensive these networks are in Europe ... and in the U.S., Russia has penetrated media organizations, lobbying firms, political parties, governments and militaries in all of these places."

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That report was circulated among the National Security Council, intelligence agencies and the State Department via secure email and cable in the spring of 2014 as part of a larger assessment of Russian intentions in Ukraine, the official said.

There was no explicit warning of a threat to U.S. elections, but the official said some diplomats and national security officials in Moscow felt the administration was too quick to dismiss the possibility that the Kremlin incursions could reach the United States.

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Even if the Russians and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin had these ambitions, they were doubtful of their capacity to execute them, the official said of the Obama administration.

Former White House officials, requesting anonymity to discuss intelligence reporting, confirmed that the administration began receiving increased traffic in 2014 about Russian disinformation and covert influence in campaigns, but said they did not recall receiving that specific warning about Russian inroads in the United States.

Ned Price, a former spokesperson for the National Security Council, rejected the idea that the administration failed to heed warnings about Russian interference in the U.S. political system or Russian cyberespionage in general.

The Obama administration was nothing but proactive in responding to Russian aggression in all of its forms, especially as Moscow became more brazen with and following its military moves against Ukraine beginning in 2014, Price said, citing sanctions and increased American support to NATO as evidence of the former administrations seriousness.

But subsequent events including Russias interference in the American election through hacks of the emails of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta, among other intrusions identified by U.S. intelligence have left many in the former administration wondering whether they could have done more.

People have criticized us ... for not coming out more forcefully and saying it, former CIA Director John Brennan said at the Aspen National Forum in July. There was no playbook for this.

On Oct. 7, 2016, about a month before the election, the administration revealed, through a statement from the director of national intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security, that the U.S. government believed Russia was behind the hacks and was seeking to interfere with the election. The revelation, which many in the White House expected to be bombshell news, was largely overshadowed by the revelation that same day of an Access Hollywood tape in which Donald Trump made crude and sexist comments to anchor Billy Bush.

But others in the national security community say an overly cautious Obama White House could have done more both during the campaign and in the previous months and years to alert Russia that it was aware of its intentions to subvert the U.S. democracy along with those of some other Western countries and would retaliate forcefully at the first sign of Russian interference.

POLITICO spoke with more than a dozen current and former officials from across the national security spectrum, including intelligence agencies, the State Department and the Pentagon. Almost all said they were aware of Russias aggressive cyberespionage and disinformation campaigns especially after the dramatic Russian attempt to hack Ukrainian elections in 2014 but felt that either the White House or key agencies were unwilling to act forcefully to counter the Russian actions.

Intelligence officials "had a list of things they could never get the signoffs on, one intelligence official said. The truth is, nobody wanted to piss off the Russians.

Among the strategies put forward prior to the 2016 election were closing two Russian dachas in Maryland and New York, which were long suspected of being Russian intelligence sites, expelling diplomats and engaging in counterintelligence operations that would alert Putin to the United States determination to strike back against any attempts at interference in the U.S. political system.

Officials outside the White House blamed micromanagement by the National Security Council for the lack of a more forceful response, while a former NSC official says any failure to act forcefully against Russia was because of concerns by the State Department and, less frequently, the Defense Department about potential retaliation by Moscow.

The frustrations [about lack of forceful action] are justified and, frankly, were shared by the White House, said the former official, who requested anonymity due to this person's continuing work in Russia.

The options were being discussed. They werent being implemented, the former official added.

The State Department and Pentagon often objected to harsher measures endorsed by the intelligence community, one official said, a difference in perspective that some attributed to the fact that diplomatic staff and defense attaches were obvious targets of retaliation, rather than intelligence officers who usually work undercover.

Concerns about Russian cyberespionage and election meddling largely grew out of the events following Russias annexation of Crimea in March 2014, followed by an aggressive Russian effort to influence the Ukrainian presidential election that May.

A Russia-backed cyberattack against Ukraines voting infrastructure during the May election was thwarted at the 11th hour. The cyberintrusions which in some cases could have changed voter tallies were discovered just hours before what could have been catastrophic outcomes.

The reports from sources deep inside the Russian government were alarming, one current U.S. official who served under the Obama administration said. We started getting stuff in April, May [of 2014] that was extraordinary about the extent of the threat and the capacities the Russians were building.

We were worried [Putin] would try to test us, recalled a former Obama administration official.

The Ukraine crisis coupled with the Kremlins embrace of National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, who continues to be granted asylum by Moscow was a sobering moment for the White House, one recently departed intelligence officer and the current administration official said.

Yet the administration still was reluctant to engage in more forceful counterintelligence strategies against the Kremlin, including more aggressively tracking and tailing Russian operatives within the United States, according to five of the officials who spoke to POLITICO.

Those outside the White House said they received frustrating mixed messages: The White House would subsequently dismiss Moscows capabilities while also citing fear of an escalation with Putin.

Price, the former NSC spokesman, denied those claims.

We responded with the same clarity of purpose following Moscows aggression against U.S. officials in Russia and, of course, in the face of the Kremlins attempt to undermine the integrity of our electoral process, he said.

But several senior intelligence and administration officials recall it differently.

It just seemed like it was difficult, especially after the Crimea and the Ukraine ... there still wasnt a willingness to more heartily engage in the effort, the former intelligence officer said.

In one particularly frustrating instance, officials said, they reiterated a longstanding desire to shut down the two Russian dachas in Maryland and New York. Amid escalating tensions, it was often presented as a way to send a message to Moscow.

For quite some time, it was an active option. Secretary Kerry refused to consider it, the former NSC official said. We were getting pushback from the head of the agency being harassed. That was a constant frustration.

Former Secretary of State John Kerry was overseas and unavailable for comment. But a former senior State Department official, speaking as a representative of Kerry, saw it differently. Kerry agreed to shut down the dachas, but had not settled on the timing, the official said.

Tensions finally reached a fever pitch in the summer of 2016. Just days before Russian operatives began releasing troves of stolen DNC emails, a CIA officer under official diplomatic cover was brutally beaten outside the U.S. embassy in Moscow. The officer managed to slip to safety inside the door of the U.S. compound but was immediately evacuated for medical care.

U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials worked frantically to compile retaliatory options for the Obama White House. Despite being presented with several strategies including more aggressively tailing Russian diplomats in the U.S. it opted to do nothing immediately.

There was some real anger, the former intelligence officer said. We werent going to mug anybody, but we could at least be more overt in our coverages. We could expel some people, we could do more overt surveillance on people.

Another former intelligence official put it this way: The longer we dont push back, the harder they push.

Even after the release of emails designed to damage Clintons campaign, the White House was reluctant to respond, something that several recently departed Obama-era officials have lamented.

After compiling a list of potential retaliatory options in the summer of 2016 including kicking out more than 100 Russian diplomats, one official told POLITICO the pushback from national security agencies was so great and varied, the NSC official said, that for months nothing was done.

Any of these actions risked a Russian reciprocation, the former NSC official said. We were kind of caught in a catch-22.

After the election, in December, the White House finally announced the expulsion of 35 diplomats and ordered the Kremlin officials out of the two Russian-owned dachas.

But in a further indication of the tensions within the Obama team, Kerry rejected suggestions that he personally break the news of the expulsions and closing of the dachas to Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, the former NSC official said. Instead, the job was left to Pat Kennedy, one of Kerrys undersecretaries.

The former State Department official, speaking for Kerry, said the option of having Kerry communicate the expulsions and closing of the dachas to Lavrov was never discussed. But the former NSC official was unmoved.

The idea of having Kerry doing it with Lavrov was raised several times and he didnt want to do it, the NSC official said.

The expulsions and closing of the dachas were symbolic moves that stung the Kremlin, but for many intelligence officers, it was too little, too late.

While some Obama White House officials privately concede that they, too, wish there had been a more forceful response, others stand by the decisions that were made.

People at the working level dont necessarily understand the full scope of policy implications, one former White House official said.

Now, to the further frustration of some intelligence officers, there is little indication that, for all Trumps bluster, hell be tougher on the Kremlin. In his first months in office, the president has signaled a willingness to work with Moscow on several fronts, and has pushed back hard against his own intelligence communitys assessment that Russia actively worked to elect him to the presidency.

Its a bitter pill for many who see Trumps election as the avoidable outcome of years worth of counterintelligence failings against Russia.

They were warned. They underestimated it until it was too late, the current administration official said of the Obama White House and Russia, with a tinge of bitterness. They just didnt know how to deal with the bad guys.

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Obama team was warned in 2014 about Russian interference - Politico

But while most politicians -- on both sides of the aisle -- were quick to condemn the rally and its participants, one individual for some 48 hours was far too measured and calculating in his response. And it took public outcry and a White House in crisis mode for President Donald Trump to course correct.

And we are right to sharply criticize both presidents for failing to stare hate squarely in the face and call it exactly what it is.

"This represents a turning point for the people of this country. We are determined to take our country back, we're going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump, and that's what we believed in, that's why we voted for Donald Trump, because he said he's going to take our country back and that's what we gotta do."

To borrow and remake an ill-fated 2012 campaign debate quote from Obama: Mr. Duke, the 1950s called, and they want their pathetically racist ideologies back.

Trump's initial response on Saturday, in which he acknowledged there were "many sides," left many of us feeling unsatisfied. We wanted him to act presidential. We wanted him to clearly enunciate the threat and condemn it in the strongest and most unequivocal language. And he let us down.

But there is also a hypocrisy in the coverage of this event and the President's subsequent responses, one that mirrors the Obama presidency and is worth exploring in greater detail.

Those of us who've spent a career identifying the evil among us and are committed to keeping America safe shake our heads at the political pretzel-twisting politicians subject themselves to. If it meets the definition of terrorism, call it that. Once the perpetrators have been identified through exhaustive investigation, describe them in easily discernible terms.

And, when I served as the special assistant to the assistant-director-in-charge of the FBI's New York office in Manhattan in 2015, I sat in on innumerable secure video teleconferences with the bureau's 56 division heads and FBI headquarters. Watching briefings in which senior FBI officials had to comply with Holder's DOJ mandate not to use "radical Islamists" to describe cases focused on radical Islamists often resulted in a wry and resigned smile from the briefer saddled with this ridiculous restriction. Holder insisted we refrain from "calling it what it is," and instead mandated that these cases be described in more nebulous and ambiguous terms: "combating violent extremism" matters.

While we're all outraged over Trump's indelicate dance to avoid calling the white racists, bigots and anti-Semites who have attached themselves like a barnacle to the GOP's ship hull what they are, let's be careful not to isolate the few, in order to smear the whole --- a lesson we were repeatedly lectured about during the Obama era.

The world just isn't as black and white as the bigoted protesters in Charlottesville would lead us to believe.

Excerpt from:
Trump is repeating Obama's mistake - CNN